The Best Job in The World

For the fifth morning in a row, Kate woke at 3am. She tossed and turned for an hour. Feet under the covers, feet stuck out in the dark over the side of the bed, too hot, too cold, and what if there were monsters out there, or someone hiding beneath the bed like Jeffrey Dean Morgan in that movie about a female doctor who rents an apartment in DUMBO that’s just too good to be true because it is too good to be true? She lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, listening over the thumping of her own heart for sounds in the dark; a woman cursed, though mostly gifted, with an overactive imagination.

By five she was up, still only half awake, making coffee in her tiny kitchen and thanking God or whoever was responsible for inventing the pod coffee machine; a necessity for those early starts when the manual dexterity required to handle actual beans or ground coffee with a spoon would have been far beyond her capability. She pressed the big silver button to open the machine, popped in the plastic coffee pod, closed the lid with a comforting snick, filled the reservoir with a cup of water and set it to brew. Magic happened inside that machine.

A hiss, a gurgle, and the scent of Arabica began to warm the kitchen. Her daily commute a mere slipper-shod shuffle across the living room floor.

By five fifteen, she was at her desk, nature’s magic already putting on a show. The dawn light purpled the sky until creeping self-awareness turned the world outside a blushing pink. Kate missed this of course since her eyes were trained on her computer screen, on the words she had written yesterday and the day before and the day before that. She read them as she would a stranger’s because to her that’s how they seemed: fresh, newly minted sentences, a story she barely recalled coming from her own fingertips much as you might faintly hold onto the fading remnants of a dream.

This was her work, and yet it never felt like work to her, not a second of it.

By midday, she’d hit two thousand words of a story set a world away from where she now sat, and her stomach was rumbling. She saved and backed up her day’s output and then she shut her laptop down. Seagulls wheeled past the window, skimming the tall dune grasses as they scavenged the churning shoreline for dead crabs or sun-ripened fish spat out by yesterday’s storm. Kate watched them for a moment or two, allowing the real world to come back into focus. She breathed slowly and deeply. The visions lessened, her characters’ voices fading, their concerns losing urgency, shelved for another time.

Kate made herself a turkey salad sandwich. She packed it in waxy red and white paper and then she grabbed a bottle of water and set off for the beach. Behind her, the little office — a simple desk in the bay window of her living room — sat still and silent, awaiting her return the next day when she would surprise herself all over again with the words she typed in her fugue-like state.

It should feel like work but it didn’t, and with the smooth, wet sand beneath her feet, a frothing wave warm as a bath breaking across her toes, Kate was beginning to suspect that she might have the best job in the world.